A general slice of life from a 40 soon to be 50 something husband, father, mountain biker,... Whatever I am into, I am REALLY into. Life is always better with gear. This blog follows my interests to a high level of mumbo jumbo detail

Thursday, December 01, 2005

2nd week of strength-making big gains

When I was in highschool my friends and I used to work out at the gym owned by a bunch of ex-want-tobe body builders. They'd just work out all day and walk around looking big.

My one friend was in there lifting one time, and one of them came up and said, "Look's like you're making some Big Gains"

Week 2 of strength is where the bodybuilders in the gym will walk up to you and comment on your Big Gains. I'm not that big a guy and I got to put 5 plates a side+some on the leg press machine.

Here I am doing sets of 5, 4, 3, 2 where the last set of 2 reps is done what was the 'theoretical' 1 rep max used to calculate the weights in all the phases.

It is really cool to be doing reps of 2 at the amount that had been considered you're 1 rep maximum. Though my squats were'nt very pretty. I'm always afraid of my knees just exploding all over the mirrors. But that is why we do 3 weeks of prep followed by several weeks of hypetrophy, so your connective tissue is strong enough to support the workouts. Your muscles can handle it, its the rest of the stuff that needs some time to get stable enough.

This year I did 2 weeks of Hypetrophy then into 2 weeks strength. I am now going to take the 2 reps at X amount and plug that into the spreadsheet and extrapolate a new theoretical maximum and plug that into the spreadsheet and redo two weeks of hypetrophy and 2 weeks of strength and then continue on into power. Though I might just redo the same weights for squats and work on form.

A friend had been trying for a lifetime to bench 225lbs. After doing Dave Morris' program last year he was able to do it in his 2nd week of strength.

The debate of strength training for cycling will go on an on. But as far as this program being able to train someone to increase the amount of weight they can lift in a fairly short amount of time, it can't be denied how well it works.